Angie the City Witch

Her house looked like something out of Neil Gaimon’s imagination.

Angie Rapalyea (Rap-al-yeah-a) lived in Philadelphia, my home city for many years. In 1998, I’d met her by responding to an online posting to learn about energy work and had found myself standing outside the gate of her home in Germantown. She was on a corner lot, in a darkly shuttered house with pointing spires and floor-to-ceiling windows of another era. Age and a gentle neglect permeated everything.

The inside of her house revealed animal pelts shewn across chairs and banisters, bones scattered across alters, and Native American drums and artifacts in odd corners. The worn wooden floor creaked (of course) as you moved. I remember a huge Grandfather clock ticking ominously by the stairs that climbed steeply up and into the shadows of the second floor.

Our first meeting was one of curiosity for me — the engineering student-turned English major, the atheist turned spiritual seeker of sorts. But I was skeptical, cynical even, distrustful of the purveyors of the numinous realms based on my Catholic upbringing and the closed-minded arrogance of the men and women of that faith who presumed, incorrectly, to possess greater wisdom and knowledge than I. My Catholic teachers had lived in worlds of dogma, dead places where curiosity was unwelcomed.

But … I had been having some numinous experiences of my own, since I was about sixteen. And I was unable to make sense of them with my preferred tools of science and rationality. So I began to delicately, slowly, see if there might be more to the world than I suspected.

Angie honored me there, never speaking about anything except what she had directly experienced herself. She did not require me to take leaps of faith but rather trained me to deepen my own experiences and to confirm, or deny, conclusions based on my own perceptions. It was, in its own way, pretty decent science.

Her face was strong and square and uncompromising. Her clothes were always flowing dresses and billowing skirts, her fingers laced with silver and turquoise, and her neck adorned with some kind of semi-precious stones. She was the student of a Ute Native American teacher named Beautiful Painted Arrow (Tsluu Teh Koy Ay), a highly respected indigenous holy man who taught her and empowered her in the ancient ways of his people and gave her the fitting spiritual name Bear Heart.

Angie spoke plainly and with little worry for how her words might land. After our first meeting, I saw her more and more, slowly entering her world, one rich with ancestors, spirit guides, sweat lodges and sun dances, an interdimensional realm beyond my imagination but as real to her as my world of concrete and blacktop.

Angie ended up being the officiant for my wedding 2 years after we'd met, and she was my spiritual counselor through my separation and divorce 5 years later. After I moved to Boulder, Colorado in 2006, I went back to see her a few months later, showing up at her door on a Friday night.

She let me into her city witch dwelling of bones and pelts and crystals. Always direct, her first words were, “Why are you?”

I had learned not to be taken aback by her forwardness. “I don’t’ know,” I said. "I felt called to see you." She nodded.

“Well, sit down and let’s find out.”

She took a Native American drum from next to her chair and began to play it softly and rhythmically, putting herself into a trance. I let my eyes wander the endless displays of spiritual odds and ends.

“I had a vision,” she announced after ten minutes. “I was standing on the bones of the earth (her words for a mountain). On my left was Beautiful Painted Arrow, my teacher. And on his left was his teacher, and then stretching back all the way along the ridge of the mountain top was the endless line of spiritual masters, standing shoulder to shoulder.” She paused.

“And then I turned and looked to my right, and you were standing next to me, shoulder to shoulder. It surprised me, at first.”

I nodded. She raised an eyebrow for emphasis but I didn’t know what she meant.

“So,” she said, with a slightly sad smile, “I can’t teach you anymore. Our relationship is finished.”

“Wait,” I said. “What?”

“You were standing next to me, as an equal,” she explained. “The message is clear: I’m not to teach you anymore. What we had is through.”

At that point, I’d been working with Angie for 8 years and although I had started a very serious study of Vajrayana Buddhism about 6 years before, I considered her my root teacher.

“You need to find another teacher,” she repeated, without sentimentality. “You’re in Boulder, right?”

I nodded a little dumbly.

“I know people up in Gold Hill. I’ll send you their information, and you can practice with them.”

And just like that, she and I were finished, at least in the context of student and teacher. (I would see her on and off again over the next decade in a friendly way, until she passed in 2017.)

True to her word, she put me in touch with the men and women running Native ceremonies in Gold Hill, Colorado, and I visited them many times over the next year, doing sits and sweats, circles and prayers, but never feeling any connection to their lineage, to the Native path, or to the men and women I met. I also explored the Vajrayana places in Boulder and Denver but nothing stood out for me.

One evening in late 2007 I was at the Boulder Integral Center, and seated in a foursome with my good friend Jason Lange, the Zen teacher Diane Musho Hamilton, and a tall, striking bald man with piercing blue eyes. We were instructed to introduce ourselves, and say why we were there, and what Integral meant to us (“Integral” being the collected works of the philosopher Ken Wilber). The bald man went first.

“They call me Junpo these days,” he began. “I’m supposed to be some kind of Zen roshi.”

I leaned forward. A roshi? That was the highest rank of a Zen teacher, someone who had spent years and years in the formal training of their minds, been tested, and been awarded that rank to carry on the lineage. It was no small thing to be a Japanese Zen roshi!

“So a couple of years ago,” he continued, unceremoniously, “I started fucking someone I shouldn’t have been fucking, a priest in my order.”

Salty language and brutal honesty 20 words into his introduction? Who the hell was this guy, I wondered.

“I ended up fucking up her marriage, my marriage, almost ruined everything I’d spend a lifetime building, and so here I am, at 64 years of age, back in therapy and doing this small self shit again.” A pause, and a twinkle in those blue eyes. “I’m here,” he continued, faithful to the prompt we had been given, “To see if Integral can explain what the fuck happened to me.” (It can, and we get into what happened to Junpo in my newest book.)

Although I didn’t know it quite yet, I had just met my teacher, Junpo Kando Denis Kelly Roshi, the 83rd Patriarch of Rinzai Zen.

He and I were about to take a wonderful ride together, one that would utterly change my life.